Resources

CW78: Growing together in mission and ministry

Churches in rural areas feel so different in many ways today from how they were 50 years ago. Parishioners in some areas of Worcestershire still remember when their vicar rode around the village on his horse, visiting every household, knowing each person by name. Now a typical vicar often has responsibility for ten churches and races around the country lanes in her car, desperately trying to squeeze in another service, seemingly never having time to stop and really listen.

CW78: Growing Together – Crossing Borders

As the whole of Europe, and these islands in particular, seek to manage the implications of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, lots and lots of heat is being generated, but often not a lot of light. Some continue to strike forward, others seek to rewind the clock. And some just try to ignore it and get on with everyday life.

CW78 Online Exclusive: Creative outreach in Cornwall

One of the most rural circuits in the Methodist Connexion, Camelford and Week St Mary’s 17 churches are served by a great bunch of local preachers, a Circuit Administrator, a Families’ and Children’s Lay Worker and a Community Outreach Worker, along with a generous Supernumerary Minister who cares for three churches.

CW 78: Germinate Leadership – a participant’s perspective

‘The church is less easy to manage than, say, a factory for making garden furniture. Churches are not just human groups organised round a straightforward task. They are primarily places of divine encounter, places where we wrestle with the meaning of God and the meaning of our own lives. They are bound to be untidy.’

Richard Holloway, Churches and How to Survive Them

CW 78: Borderlands Butty Van

Borderlands Rural Chaplaincy is an ecumenical initiative of Wolverhampton & Shrewsbury Methodist District and the Diocese of Hereford. To get local conversations going in Shropshire, a small group started a Butty Van which travels within a fifteen mile radius of the village of Kenley, near Much Wenlock.

CW78 Online Exclusive: 15 years of reaching dads

Fifteen years of The Bible Reading Fellowship’s Who Let The Dads Out? programme proves that churches can attract more dads by creating welcoming spaces for them to enjoy spending time with each other and with their children.

CW78: A vicar’s life

Somebody asked me the other day, ‘What’s it like being a media star?’ I replied, ‘I must confess I’ve never even thought about it.’ I prefer to say that I have been in the privileged position of featuring in a TV documentary that has helped dispel some of the myths and preconceived ideas around what a vicar is and what they do.

CW78 Online Exclusive: A Vicar’s Life – Hereford Diocese press release

Four clergy in the Diocese of Hereford were the focus of A Vicar’s Life, a six-part documentary series broadcast on BBC Two in 2018.